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Food and meals in early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings play a vital role in health promotion and sustainable development because they constitute a significant part of the children’s total diet and considerably influence their eating habits and preferences. This paper aims to find and identify traces of sustainability in food practices in a Norwegian kindergarten by analyzing each of the four dimensions of sustainability relevant to ECEC: ecological, economic, and social/cultural sustainability, and good governance. Primary data sources for this paper include interviews with kindergarten staff, supplemented with non-participatory observation during mealtime. By looking into how this kindergarten integrated sustainability thinking into their practices and organizational structures—from designing a menu to managing a meal and incorporating children’s voices in the process—this study shows that purposefully designed food provision may promote sustainability in ECEC. In addition, it draws our attention to how the kindergarten environment can serve as an arena for children to act as change agents for sustainable food practices in kindergarten settings and beyond.

Kindergarten has the potential to influence children's food choices and habits at an early age and prevent nutrition-related diseases later in life. This paper comparatively analyzed the goals and requirements for kindergarten food and meal policies and guidelines in Norway and China based on the author's selfconstructed 'NES' analytical framework, including nutritional, educational, and social aspects. The findings suggest that while Norway and China both acknowledge the importance of nutritional importance of food and meals in kindergartens, Norway has paid significant attention to the social aspects of meals. There were also a number of differences between Norway and China in terms of specific educational goals related to food and meals. This analysis aimed to inform future policy direction across the fields of public health and educational policy and practice in Norway, China, and beyond.

Visual methods have been emphasised as alternative and complementary to traditional data collection methods in research with children and as useful tools in presenting conceptual and analytical frameworks. In their capacity to evoke the non-rational and material aspects of life, visual methods are also particularly beneficial in exploring everyday, taken for granted, institutional food practices. This article describes the way in which two sets of visual methods, namely representations and researcher-created data, were utilised within a study on a changing food practice in a Norwegian kindergarten. The representation is of a conceptual model, featuring Hedegaard’s cultural-historical wholeness approach and Fullan’s change model, which is visually presented. With this visualized conceptualisation, the study realises the goal of understanding the societal, institutional and individual perspectives in the change process. The researcher-created data included visual materials and video observations, exemplifying the change outcomes in relation to children’s experiences and participation in the “new” meal situation as well as their liking of, acceptance and consumption of the new food. This article concludes that the visual methods adopted are helpful both in conceptualisation and in data collection and generate important insights about the change of food practices.